#67 Bumpers, Not Walls: Parenting Teens Through Stress, Anxiety & Independence with Jennifer Jaeger

So I'd love to talk.

We've been talking a little bit about the importance of relationship and that's pretty related to attachment.

And I know you've done some work around attachment and I'd love to talk about what that means from your perspective.

What does attachment look like and how is it different for teenagers?

I think the important thing to remember is that with each developmental change and stage, we get sort of a revisiting of the attachment themes.

So in working in the adoption field and being an adoptive mom also, it's been very interesting.

I mean, with my son, his story is a tough story and we were his third family.

So it was easy to see why he didn't trust us.

But when you're a biological parent or you adopted but you were in the birthing room and have a wonderful open relationship with the biological parent, then we forget sometimes that there's still fundamental attachment things that all of us have.

We have it as just our animalistic nature.

I mean, I see it even in my horses.

I see it in my dog.

We all have our early childhood lessons that we've come here to learn that continue to play out throughout our lifespan.

What I try to remind parents is again, they talk like very savvy adults and they may be on paper very cognitively smart, but their emotions and their attachment revert back to those early childhood years.

And I'm talking zero to three.

I mean, it's really so when you've got a team that's getting ready to start school and it depends on their history, it depends on what's happening.

But if there's something happening in the family, like a divorce, a death, even a move, even if it's a good thing and you're moving to a bigger house in a more fun area, it doesn't matter.

Change triggers that attachment brain and we will revert back to some early attachment things.

So a parent with a physical um ailment going on a parent going through some medical things it will go back to some early childhood things so your teenager all of a sudden in many ways can function like a team because what i hear parents saying a lot is well they have no problem going out with their friends and acting normal with their friends why are they at home melting down with me or freezing me out or freaking out and saying they can't go to school but yet they have no problem going to the mall to shop to go out with their friends because going out with their friends and finding clothes that make them feel good or hanging out with their friends is safe for them the and they hold it together all day long out in these public spaces and when they come home then with you they're going to play out some of the things that feel more unsafe and that doesn't mean that you as a parent are necessarily unsafe although sometimes there's that dynamic going on because try as we may like we experience this as adoptive parents we can never redo some of that corrective things that we'd like to redo from the early childhood abandonment but it doesn't have to always be dark or heavy or abandonment rejection but that's how the attachment brain kind of works and sometimes your teen feels like things You're abandoning me by not letting me wear the shirt that I want to wear.

Literally, this is a conversation I had one of my kids recently.

Well, she's got all kinds of things going on in her family, but because her mom wanted her to wear more of a different shirt, it was like, you're rejecting me.

You're abandoning me.

That attachment brain was like, danger, danger.

So I think it's really important for parents to remember that we're talking about a primal structure.

in the back part of our brain that doesn't easily connect to that front logical thinking and if we can remember as parents okay my 14 year old is talking in one way but my two-year-old is actually feeling really unsafe what would i do if my two-year-old were transforming right now And start there and then build up to hopefully having a conversation over the next few days.